With my life slowing down in many ways, kind of a settling of sorts after several years that felt turbulent, I’ve been thinking about fulfillment and how to navigate contentment and happiness right now. 

There’s been so much space this year both on a personal and societal level to navigate pain, loss, grief, anxiety – and I’ve found myself more than once overwhelmed by it. I’m not negating those feelings because they are the catalyst for seeing and experiencing things differently, rather I’m trying to learn from them. With the past few weeks almost trickling by I’ve been starting my days with play, thinking about gratitude, trying to figure out what I even actually want because I think the past few years has made me feel lost in a number of ways.

Being lost for a period of time is a good thing – you’re forced to swim in waters unfamiliar to you, ebb and flow with the tides, learn new rhythms and you see so much. At some point though (at least in my case), you start to yearn for home, whatever that means for you, and the past year or so has had me feeling that deeply. I’ve been seeking the contentment that routine and slowing down bring, the happiness that comes from living joyfully in the moment and engaging with your values. Much of this year has been a rediscovery of those things.

When I began thinking about this, truthfully, I wasn’t sure what to say about contentment because until recently, I haven’t been particularly content. Creatively I want to do more but haven’t figured out what that “more” is exactly; as a mama, I rarely feel as if I’m doing enough even though I know I do; and in other areas I feel that I’m at an odd spot, stuck in a way. I don’t think I really understood what I wanted out of life until recently because I hadn’t taken the time to slow down and recalibrate – adjust that what I want out of life has shifted in the last several years while I was drifting about and release expectations that have been holding me back from enjoying my life as it is.

Shifting how I think about contentment has lead me to frame it as a way to create routine around the things that I want to incorporate in my life. I’m working on bringing happiness to the everyday routine, intentionally living with joy regardless of days that may feel frustrating, overwhelming or lonely (and I know with covid so many of us are experiencing this in some way right now). It’s been difficult in some ways for me to shift my habits and thoughts to being content and I think for some time it’ll be a true work in progress.

So this week a small successes – happiness was photographing the orange tree in my yard, seeing the light bounce across her leaves and enjoying the crisp morning outside. Enjoying warm sunshine playing on the swings and running around the house just playing with my kids. Drinking my coffee hot and in slowness before rushing off to start the day.

Thanks for reading!

In an effort to be a bit more transparent about the processes that makeup my artistic practice, I wanted to delve into talking about brainstorming, how I conceptualize projects and what my workflow looks like early in a project. This process definitely varies a bit for me as I experiment with various media and incorporate new research into my work but I love hearing about how others work and wanted to share a bit about how I do as well.

Typically I work best on multiple projects at the same time (not because I have an excess of time but because then I can bend my work into my schedule more fluidly) and currently, I have a few projects in the works – a book (coming March 2021, I cannot wait to share the details!), some new/ongoing long term photographic work, mixed media work that I’m still trying to translate into a meaningful component of my practice and because I have a hard time focusing/waiting for film to come back a small zine of snippets from my archives tentatively titled Jupiter & Her Moons.

I usually begin my work with several general themes in mind. Since most of my work is diaristic/self documentary in nature these themes often have todo with my daily life and issues that intersect that experience. From there, I test and explore my ideas both written and visually to get a feel for the film, materials, and output types I would like to work with. I start to ask questions about the information, emotion, visual intersection of ideas, aesthetics, getting into more detail as the project progresses. I try to answer these questions both visually and in written form, I think that this helps me to flesh out my ideas and create images that more strongly reflect what I am trying to convey. I keep a sketchbook with drawings, photographs (mostly test images from my phone), and words that I find interesting or help inform what I am thinking. I am constantly referring back to these ideas throughout the course of a project so that I can use where my thoughts have “been” to help facilitate where they are “going”.

Lately, I’ve been doing some reading on particle physics (my guilty pleasure) and my three year old has become really interested in the books. Long story short we started learning about space together and she is just fascinated by moons. Some more research and I fell back in love with many of the themes that interested me before I had babies – cosmology, ecology, interaction. The past several months have seen me feeling a variety of ways about my creative practice – everything from apathetic and “never making work again” to overjoyed and feeling like I’m finally making the work I’ve wanted to for years and most days lately seem to be leaning towards the apathetic end , I’m finding it extra important to delve into work that I love and feels meaningful to me.

Anyway, back to it. I love to fiddle within work for periods of time letting the work grow and expand on its own, retracting images, creating new ones, re-sequencing – its really important to me that the work has the ability to grow organically and experience itself in a variety of ways before I push it too far. To this end I usually find the earliest parts of my projects taking significantly longer than the later stages, which can sometimes feel boggy or frustrating but I am always glad for looking back. This is especially true for my photographic work, I oftentimes find that my near constant play with the images allows for them to grow many times over before I feel a project is complete and its one of the things I love most about my images looking back. Although that amount of growth isn’t probably apparent to the viewer it makes me love each image that much more. The past few months have seen my practice slow down a bit as I navigated a move but I’m excited to jump back into it and see what this season holds.

How has the last several months seen your practice change?

Thanks for reading!